Fall arrest devices are commonly used by persons working at height which would be dangerous if that person was to fall from such a height. One common type of fall arrest device is an anchor which is used to secure one end of a rope or the like which is also secured to the person at the other end. Such anchors may be formed of a post which may be independent of or formed integrally with another barrier member.
Many fall arrest posts have been commonly secured to a top surface of a concrete slab or the like. Such posts, require fastening to the concrete slab which requires permanently securing the post to the concrete slab by fasteners such as anchor bolts. Disadvantageously, drilling and securing an anchor bolt into a previously formed concrete slab is known to potentially cause damage to the concrete slab, including the reinforcing bars. Furthermore, damage to the concrete slab or inadvertently exposing a reinforcing bar by drilling expose the reinforcing bars to adverse weather which may therefore make them prone to oxidization and further degradation. An example of such a system may be found at U.S. Pat. No. 6,695,095 issued Feb. 24, 2004 to Franke.
In many locations it is also undesirable to leave barriers in place when not in use. In such locations, it has become common practice to provide a hole or socket into which the anchor post is inserted for use. Conventional post sockets have not adequately provided the desired level of a secure support for fall arrest anchors. In particular, some previous attempts have been to provide a cup or sleeve inserted in to the concrete slab. Such cups however have lacked sufficient surface area to provide an adequate level of pull out resistance for high loads placed upon the fall arrest anchor. Examples of such inserts may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,712,014 issued Jan. 23, 1973 to Waerner. Such embedded anchoring sockets often do not provide sufficient reinforcement when placed under a typical load (e.g. a cable force of as little as 1 kN). These conventional embedded sockets, when placed under load, will either crack and damage the surrounding concrete structure (in which they are embedded) or pullout entirely from the concrete, thereby creating a safety hazard.
Other designs have attempted to provide anchor rods extending from the insert cup to increase the surface area provided by embedded socket and thereby spread the resulting force over a larger portion of the concrete slab so as to provide a larger pull out strength. Examples of such designs may be found at U.S. Pat. No. 4,179,151 issued Dec. 18, 1979 to Tye. Such designs have limited lateral strength to resist torques or bending rotations of the fall arrest post due to the construction of the plastic material utilized in such apparatus as well as locating the anchoring rods at the bottom portion of the apparatus only.
Finally, it is known that concrete slabs or concrete structures (in which such anchoring sockets may be embedded) or often of different depths or thicknesses. Conventional embedded anchoring sockets are typically designed at a set size and would require to be offset (height-wise) within the concrete structure, to ensure that the top of such socket still corresponds to the top of the concrete structure.
Therefore what is needed is a fall arrest system and anchoring socket that does not suffer from the above-noted disadvantages.